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self-indulgence: on the other, contempt for "braininess" and worship
of games, contempt for foreigners and the working class, an almost
neurotic dread of poverty, and, above all, the assumption not only
that money and privilege are the things that matter, but that it is
better to inherit them than to have to work for them. Broadly, you
were bidden to be at once a Christian and a social success, which
is impossible. At the time I did not perceive that the various ideals
which were set before us canceled out. I merely saw that they were
all,
or nearly all, unattainable, so far as I was concerned, since they all
depended not only on what you did but on what you
were.
Very early, at the age of only ten or eleven, I reached the con–
clusion-no one told me this, but on the other hand I did not simply
make it up out of my own head: somehow it was in the air I
breathed-that you were no good unless you had £100,000. I had
perhaps fixed on this particular sum as a result of reading Thackeray.
The interest on £100,000 a year (I was in favor of a safe 4 per cent),
would be £4,000, and this seemed to me the minimum income
that you must possess if you were to belong to the real top crust,
the people in the country houses. But it was clear that I could never
find my way into that paradise, to which you did not really belong
unless you were born into it. You could only
make
money, if at all,
by a mysterious operation called "going into the City," and when
you came out of the City, having won your £100,000, you were
fat and old. But the truly enviable thing about the top-notchers
was that they were rich while young. For people like me, the am–
bitious middle class, the examination passers, only a bleak, laborious
kind of success was possible. You clambered upwards on a ladder of
scholarships into the Home Civil Service or the Indian Civil Service,
or possibly you became a barrister. And if at any point you "slacked"
or "went off" and missed one of the rungs in the ladder, you be–
came "a little office boy at forty pounds a year." But even if you
climbed to the highest niche that was open to you, you could still
only be .an underling, a hanger-on of the people who really counted.
Even if I had not learned this from Sim and Bingo, I would
have learned it from the other boys. Looking back, it is astonishing
how intimately, intelligently snobbish we all were, how knowledgeable
about names and addresses, how swift to detect small differences in
accents and manners and the cut of clothes. There were some boys
